Everybody Loves Breaking Bad

Breaking Bad Season Four Episode One

Box Cutter

Vince Gilligan, Alan Bernstein,

Bryan Cranston, Anna Gunn,

Aaron Paul, Giancarlo Esposito,

Jonathan Banks, Betsy Brandt

            Wait so was that Gale’s box cutter or just a box cutter Gale used? Maybe at the start of another episode down the line we’ll see this nice scene where Gus gives it to Gale as a gift and is like “if anyone ever kills you, rest assured I’ll use that to kill someone else.” This episode starts with one of those kinds of scenes, in this one though we go back in time to see someone talking about how powerful the main character is, it’s very much like a shonen comic. Vegeta might as well have been screaming out nine thousand, Gus’ scouter exploding on his face. The lauded 3 percent will put Gale’s favorite and most cherished box cutter to good use in the hands of Gus the psycho.

            At least we get to see Gus expose his power to the others in the group, we always knew he was powerful but now we have proof of all of his… power. I usually change clothes before I kill someone, too, lime green and tangerine being the colors I love to murder in. “Get back to work,” “we’re on the same page,” “what page is that?”

Why is Skylar so damn annoying? Well the answer is sort of clear to anyone who’s watched a bit of the Twilight Zone, in any escapist type of television aimed at males the women characters seem to enter into one of a few archetypes, one being the nagging wife (when you consider that almost no man in the Twilight Zone is happily married, you suddenly appreciate the strong female characters in the Outer Limits even more). Well Skylar is getting an upgrade, she has a new power: the liar. Boy, can she lie her way out of anything! Just like that super ridiculous annoying scene from season 3 when she explains to her sister (who has become one of my favorite characters in the series, now that she’s the downtrodden optimistic) Walt’s “gambling problem” and all of the details of that stupid-ass excuse. Anna Gunn puts those acting chops to good use.

But overall this wasn’t too bad an episode, we get some interesting parts of Walt and Jesse’s relationship actually spoken from Walt’s lips, “When you make it Gale versus me, or Gale versus Jesse, Gale loses. Simple as that.” It’s the family you hear about in old sch(k)ool hip-hop, it’s the kind of connection that going through a bunch of fucked up shit together will create between two people. And that’s what this series is all about, the family and what you’d do for that family. Look what gus has done for Walt in previous episodes, maybe they’re more on the same page than Walt can ever know,  sitting in that room with Mike disposing of bodies together, it’s the kind of family fun that makes the show sort of heart warming. I think.

But the show is also about something else, that being the writers. A huge part of the appeal of this show is that the writers put the characters through said fucked up shit, and then somehow (it’s not hard when you’re the Master of the Universe) get the characters out of it. It’s also about  some weird consistency, “why doesn’t that dude that’s always watching them in the lab just cook the meth?” and problem solving (on the writers’ parts, not the characters… those guys aren’t actually real). So we see some of that, too, the writers considering every possible fanboy complaint that could sprout from paying too much attention and expecting some amount of “realism” from a show which is obviously one long episode of the Twlight Zone. But a pretty good episode.